CHAPTER THREE

OUR LADY OF THE WRONG TROUSERS
A boy tries hard to be a man

His mother takes him by his hand
If he stops to think he starts to cry
Oh why

Transvestite.

There, that’s it written down in black and white, bright and bold in twelve point Gill Sans MT. Even though I can barely bring myself to utter it out loud I’ve finally managed to put it on the page without reaching for the delete button though I’ve I had to keep my eyes tight shut as I tap-tapped away at the keyboard.

Just mouthing it silently makes me feel sick. Does the English language possess a word more ugly, more loaded with nauseous insinuation? Every syllable seems weighed down with revulsion and tumbles from the tongue like a torrent of foul-smelling sewage. Now I come to think about it, I can’t think of a more appropriate term to describe the late Simon Taylder esquire.

I remember him first discovering the word, in Robert Stoller’s seminal Sex and Gender in Denton Public library; he was barely into puberty and the nuances of sex and gender were a world he’d yet to set foot in. Not that I’d been idle, I’d been working hard on his malleable little brain from the moment he’d learned to open his mouth; it was more a case of leading him in the right – or perhaps, as far as your concerned, the wrong – direction rather than adopting a more autocratic approach.

Do you know what I did? I was extremely ingenious, even though I say so myself. Having already established his predilection for bands with big hair his grandmother would deride whenever they appeared on Top of the Pops, I deftly pointed him in the direction of ‘The Who’ knowing full well that the long, blond curls of Roger Daltrey would prove irresistible to a boy of his disposition. Not that I’m questioning Mr Daltrey’s masculinity, you understand, it’s just that he offered a useful stepping stone; Mr Daltrey was followed, almost seamlessly, by Mr Robert Plant who eventually metamorphosed into Mr John Francis Bongiovi (that’s Jon Bon Jovi to you) from whence it was but a small step to the likes of Messrs Simon le Bon and John Taylor of Duran Duran.

By that time the eighties were in full swing and I’d unleashed upon him a veritable Pandora’s Box of glam frontmen that included Messrs Steven Tyler and William Bruce Rose, Jr (better known to you as Axl Rose) of Aerosmith and Guns ‘n’ Roses fame, respectively. Contrary to popular opinion it was not Mr George O’Dowd (aka Boy George) that brought out the feminine side of Simon Taylder esquire, it was that gorgeous Nordic glamour puss Joey Tempest of Europe. Check out the video of The Final Countdown on YouTube; it’s disturbingly uncanny, the way he tosses his head back and shakes his curly mane – he could almost be my nemesis. Check out the video of The Final Countdown on YouTube; it’s disturbingly uncanny, the way he tosses his head back and shakes his curly mane. If you pause the video at three minutes and two seconds you will see an almost perfect likeness of my nemesis.

Jesus, it’s enough to send me into a cold sweat. I’ve burnt every photo I had of him but still his image comes back to haunt me.  

There was a time when Simon would have given everything to resemble Joey Tempest but I had alternative plans for him and being a poodle-haired pop star was definitely not one of them. I soon put the mockers of that joke a rock band he formed with fellow members of St Michael’s School sixth form. I shall spare them the embarrassment of naming them individually, suffice to say they were known, collectively, as Nöggin the Nög and were very nearly expelled for skiving off to play a lunchtime gig. Talk about sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll! He was on rhythm guitar; or rather he strutted about the stage whilst strumming one of the three chords he could play proficiently. Musician? Never. Poser? Big time, my love. Big time.

But I’m running ahead of myself once more; trying too hard to sound like Virginia Woolf whilst coming across like Jackie Collins morphing into a second rate Thomas Hardy. I didn’t introduce Simon to The Who to give him an insight into late sixties R ‘n’ B – what a godforsaken decade that was – I only took him there to send him scurrying to the dictionary where he discovered a new word and thus, by definition, a new world.

I daresay the lyrics of The Who’s I’m a Boy weren’t written to encourage the likes of Simon in their unfortunate habits; the ‘poor’ subject of the song was, of course, compelled to dress and behave like a girl and for the life of him Simon couldn’t understand what the fuck he was moaning about. To him it seemed like paradise, a scenario he daydreamed about day-in day-out and that filled his every fantasy, both sexual and cerebral. The blurb informed him that the song addressed the thorny issue of ‘enforced transvestism’, a concept he didn’t comprehend so he went and looked it up in Denton public library – furtively, because he knew what he was doing would be frowned upon. Even at that early age he was beginning to develop a guilt complex. 

‘A propensity to dress in clothes of the opposite sex’. That’s what the dictionary told him, so now he knew what he was doing. More importantly, he knew it wasn’t right, that it was a practice he should keep utterly secret for fear of ridicule – or worse.

It was that ‘worse’ I feared the most. It was to avoid the likely consequences of that ‘worse’ that I decided to let Simon think he was indeed nothing more than a mere transvestite when the real diagnosis was of a far more serious nature; fatal, to be precise. Well, you wouldn’t want to lumber a fourteen year-old with that kind of news, would you? And it’s not as if his untimely end was imminent. He’d have more than enough time to live the sort of life fourteen year-old boys do except that he never really would live the sort of life fourteen year-old boys do. Not quite.

I say ‘mere transvestite’ as if it were an ailment as widespread as the common or garden cold but it struck Simon like a thunderbolt from the blue beyond; no matter how ugly the label, somehow it seemed to vindicate him, as if he had a legitimate medical condition. Perhaps he was right; if so, the prognosis was grim.

Much as I hate the terminology, if Simon could live with transvestism then so, for the time being, could I. Besides which, the alternatives – the ‘worse’ – didn’t bear thinking about, even at this early stage of the narrative I had to proceed with extreme caution lest the dreaded powers-that-be cottoned on to his behaviour and attempted to do something about it. The world is full of well-meaning but misguided psychologists who seek to tinker with reality not as nature intended it but as how they’d prefer it to be. I should know, I’ve been on the receiving end of their trickery often enough and not one of them has managed to make a difference – although I confess that I’ve never walked into their clinics with the intention of allowing them to. It’s all about power, isn’t it? They try to impose their authority upon us; we have an obligation to fight back.

They sit you down, they try to put you at ease; they try to lull you into a false sense of security. They butter you up with flattery and fine words, use smooth talk and sweet nothings in an attempt to gain your trust then come at you, thrusting and parrying, looking for your Achilles Heel. Credit due where credit’s due, ninety nine times out of a hundred they’ll succeed but only because the likes of you let them!

Have you no sense of dignity? Do you let every Tom, Dick or Harriet run roughshod over you like that? Small wonder that I, the writer, have been cast in the active role while you, the reader, are content to take on a more passive disposition. Small wonder the world’s the way it is, sycophants and parasites on every street corner; it would never have happened in the nineteen eighties.

But you understand why I had to keep Simon from the psychologists prying minds, don’t you? They’d have dissected his psyche, turned his consciousness inside out and opened the doors of perception so fucking wide that the wind would have gusted in and blown me away. Yes, yes, yes. Simon was such an ineffectual, impressionable fool that even the most inept cognitive behavioural therapist (and they are legion) would have restored him to what they laughingly call ‘normality’. And what, then, would have become of me? I’m afraid that for all your liberal protestations, when it comes to the crunch it’s the survival of the fittest and I know who I’d put my money on if came down to a catfight between you and me.

Whatever. Somehow Simon managed to struggle through puberty and adolescence without being taken away by the men – and women – in white coats though I know for a fact that his family knew what was going on. I guess they thought he’d eventually grow out of it; if they’d known then what they know now I’m sure they’d have been on the ‘phone to the local child psychiatrist demanding an appointment but once he’d reached eighteen and left home there was absolutely nothing they could do. The moment he set foot on the train to Weymouth I was safe, I’d cleared the first and most formidable hurdle. From now on he could do what he wanted whenever he wanted and I’d always be there to goad him on.

But I’d be doing you a disservice if I pretended those eighteen years passed by without incident, the stress and the anxiety took its toll on both his nerves and mine. Call it a lack of imagination on my part if you will but at the time the only means of dealing with the constant procession of crises and catastrophes was to resort to alcohol. It stifled his wit and dulled his brain whenever anticipation threatened to get the better of him. More importantly, it snuffed out what little passion he had, emotionally and physically. ‘Too drunk to fuck’, sang the Dead Kennedys, ‘too drunk to fuck’ muttered a string of short-term female lovers as he turned his back on them and fell into a inebriated stupor. You can see what I was trying to do, can’t you? To say he was paranoid about sex and sexuality would be risking hyperbole but insecurity was growing inside him like a cancer and I made it my business to spread it about his body.

Freud wrote an awful lot of rot and nonsense about penis envy, he’d clearly never come across the likes of Simon Taylder esquire or he’d have to revise his so-called ‘theories’. There was, for the time being, nothing I could do about his offending – and offensive – member; I’d not yet reached that stage of the plan, I was still wondering how I might introduce the idea to Simon. Never mind, if I couldn’t get rid of the damn thing I could always make sure his attachment to it remained purely physiological so that when it came to the crunch – no pun intended – he’d be glad to kiss it goodbye.

Metaphorically, of course!

Jesus, what a fucking monster I turned out to be! Still, beats being a boring non-entity hands down. Rather a bad reputation than no reputation at all, better to be hated than to be considered irrelevant. Tell me, on a scale of one to ten where one is loved and ten is loathed, just how much of a tyrant do you consider me to be? Seven or eight? Listen, you ain’t seen the half of it yet. By the time you get to the end of the next chapter you’ll be giving me a nine or a ten and if/when you get to the end of the narrative you’ll be on the ‘phone to the police, demanding my arrest.

But it’s too late for that. Much too late, I’m afraid.